LIBERTY, DEBAUCHERY, FRATERNITY

A Rake's Progress, a series of eight paintings by 18th- century
English artist William Hogarth, details the roguish antics of its
well-heeled anti-hero, Tom Rakewell, whose surname's etymology
comes from the notion of raking up hell. Byron's epic poem Don Juan
charts the exploits of the 17th-century Spanish noble
ne'er-do-well, and the full title of Mozart's famous opera, based
on the same character, is Il Dissoluto Punito, Ossia il Don
Giovanni, which translates as 'The Rake Punished, or Don Giovanni'.
(Mozart himself was no stickler for propriety, as evidenced by his
canon in B-flat major, Leck mich im Arsch - literally, 'Lick me in
the arse'.) Easily the most compelling character in William
Thackeray's Vanity Fair is the debauched blue- blood Lord
Steyne.

The dissolute cad is as prevalent a persona in the fictional
canon as the noble savage, the tragic hero or the penniless but
honest working girl. As well this character type is not limited to
previous centuries - British actor Nigel Havers is just one actor
to have made a career out of playing posh cads - or European
culture (as demonstrated by Japanese woodblock artist Tsukioka
Yoshitoshi's A Dissolute Nobleman Drinking with Geisha).

And, whether you believe in Aristotelian mimesis or Oscar
Wilde's counterpoint assertion that, 'Life imitates art far more
than art imitates life', what is certain is that reality is as
replete with such well-heeled, extraordinarily licentious
characters as our cultural repository. Arguably the original high
society libertine was John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, a poet
and courtier to Charles II who personified the Restoration's
rampantly active rebellion against the

Puritan era's vehemently censorious disapproval of any kind of
pleasures of the flesh. Generally attributed to Wilmot is the
obscene Restoration closet drama Sodom. First published in 1684,
the play's characters included Bolloxinion, King of Sodom; his
queen, Cuntigratia; Buggeranthos, general of the army; and a trio
of maids of honour called Fuckadilla, Cunticulla and Clytoris.

Wilmot's behaviour was even more gloriously obscene than his
doggerel. For 15 years, following a youth misspent abducting young
countesses and roistering with the navy in the Second Dutch War,
Wilmot led a group dubbed the Merry Gang by metaphysical poet
Andrew Marvell. This band of aristos and literary reprobates, which
included the wit Charles Sedley and the enviably titled Master of
the Revels Thomas Killigrew, were notorious for escapades such as
public simulation of buggery and regular, gleeful genital exposure.
A tavern-haunting whoremonger for his entire brief life, Wilmot
died from venereal disease, inevitably enough, aged 33.

By now, though - 1680 - rampant bacchanalia had caught on in
high society, and a couple of decades after Wilmot's death another
well-heeled bounder, by the name of Philip Wharton, entered the
world. A dashing Jacobite reprobate, the 1st Duke of Wharton was
described by one biographer as 'two men: one, a man of letters, and
two, a drunkard, a rioter, an infidel and a rake'. A freemason and
fervent atheist, Wharton founded the first organisation to bear the
name Hellfire Club, in 1719. His goal was to deride religious faith
by publicly presiding over a feast of Christian ritual parody, with
plenty of satanic trappings ladled over the top, in a tavern near
London's St. James's Square.

Tales of Wharton's mischievous exploits are legion. Just a month
after inheriting the first of his titles, aged 16, he eloped with
the daughter of a senior military figure. Throughout his life, he
not only accumulated vast debts but also squandered entire fortunes
(one of which came from selling his title back to King George I).
When he lost around 600-times the average London income in the
South Sea Bubble stock market crash of 1720 - a development that
led to the abandonment of his group - he splashed out for musicians
and a hearse in order to hold a public funeral for the demised
company.

The name Hellfire Club would endure as a designation for
upper-class debauchery thanks to the efforts of one Sir Francis
Dashwood, whose own dubious collective, founded in 1749, comprised
an elite circle of respected intellectuals, artists du jour and
prominent figures from George III's government. This motley band
would, during time out from masterminding Britain's empirical
endeavours, creep up the Thames in a gondola to the ruins of an
abbey near West Wycombe, where they indulged in ritualistic
depravities that made the occult ritual attended by Tom Cruise's
character in Eyes Wide Shut look like a Connecticut bar
mitzvah.

The ceremonies presided over by Sir Francis were bestowed the
name Hellfire Club not by him and his cronies, but by a
censorious establishment who deplored it with vigour. The chromatic
spectrum is really too narrow for 'colourful character' to be a
suitable epithet for Sir Francis. An MP for 20 years, and
Chancellor of the Exchequer between 1762 and 1763, he had form when
it came to themed gatherings. His Society of Dilettanti club
involved him and about 40 of his peers who, during their Grand
Tour, had experienced Rome standing around in togas, discussing the
city's art, literature and antiquities. His Divan Club entitled men
who had visited the Ottoman Empire to congregate and indulge in a
similar chin-stroke over their memories of the Caucasus.

It was during his trip to Italy on his tours that Sir Francis
developed a fierce antipathy towards the prudish braggadocio of the
Roman Catholic Church. So fervent was his disdain he even went to
the trouble of commissioning blasphemous portraits of himself,
including one by Hogarth portraying him as a Franciscan friar
leering at a statue of the Goddess Venus with one breast
revealed.

The Knights of St. Francis originally congregated in the George
& Vulture pub in the City of London - these days a chop house
whose folklore is nicely enriched by its decadent past. It wasn't
until 1750 that Sir Francis acquired Medmenham Abbey, a
13th-century Cistercian Order building, shut down by Henry VIII
during the Dissolution of Monasteries. Sir Francis made the
building, close to his ancestral home in West Wycombe, fit for
purpose by revamping it in the fusion Gothic and Neoclassical style
fashionable at the time, adding a cloister and a tower and having
the motto Fay çe que vouldras - Do what thou wilt - carved over the
doorway.

He then began work on the notorious 'Hellfire Caves'. According
to some accounts - which, if true, exemplify a gulf between
accepted notions of morality and genuine human decency that exists,
sadly, today - he hired far more labour than necessary at a then
tidy rate of one shilling a day, to alleviate local suffering
caused by poor harvests.

These days, school parties can often be found knee- skidding
their way through the caves' dusty crannies and corridors, but it's
unlikely parents would want their offspring to bear witness to what
went on here in the 18th century. Offering a clue are the phallic
symbols and other salacious imagery Sir Francis had daubed onto the
walls. As well, the caves' layout bears an uncanny resemblance to
the male and female reproductive organs in a state of ecstatic
union, with the catacombs, banqueting hall and buttery representing
the ovaries, womb and testicles respectively.

As for what went on in the 'Triangle' - placed, tellingly,
equidistantly from the banqueting hall and the buttery - it's fair
to assume that Sir Francis, his powerful but prurient pals, and as
many mistresses and courtesans as their tongues could handle
engaged in the kind of orgiastic mayhem that would, to paraphrase
Morrissey, have turned the Emperor Caligula himself a rich tone of
crimson.

Statesman and art historian Horace Walpole, meanwhile, showing a
great knack for the type of prim euphemism that prevailed in that
era, wrote: 'Whatever their doctrines were, their practice was
rigorously pagan: Bacchus and Venus were the deities to whom they
almost publicly sacrificed, and the nymphs and the hogsheads that
were laid in against the festivals of this new church sufficiently
informed the neighbourhood of the complexion of those hermits.' For
'pagan', many historians say, read 'pseudo-satanic': parodies of
Christian rituals, cursing ceremonies and the like, climaxed with a
'Black Mass' involving the naked body of a disgracednoblewoman.

By the time of Sir Francis's and his chums' exploits, hardcore
mischief had become pretty much de rigueur for any high-society
member with a creative fire in their belly - something not lost on
the romantic poets of mid-to- late-18th century England. Having
inherited the title of his great uncle at the age of 10, Lord Byron
indulged in jaunts on Lake Geneva, where wine flowed as copiously
as laudanum (a form of liquefied opium), and conducted a string of
illicit affairs (most scandalously with Lady Caroline Lamb) before
almost certainly impregnating his half-sister, Augusta, and heading
south to fight for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire.
'Mad, bad and dangerous to know,' was how Lamb famously described a
man who attracted women like nectar attracts hummingbirds, in part
because of his dashing looks but also thanks to lavish generosity
that put him deeply into debt.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, meanwhile, by the age of 23 had gained his
own notoriety as an apologist for God-spurning free love and opium,
which he used with the same mental- door-opening literary purposes
as Aldous Huxley would with L.S.D. around 140 years later. Shelley
never saw literary success in his own lifetime; most publishers
refused to publish his work for fear of being pinched for blasphemy
or sedition. Fond, in his youth, of blowing up trees with
gunpowder, Shelley, too, would attend the Lake Geneva binges with
his stunning 18-year-old mistress, Frankenstein author Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin.

Meanwhile, about 350 miles to the north-west in Épernon, France,
another louche literary figure, the Paris- born aristocrat,
revolutionary politician, philosopher and writer Marquis de Sade,
was being laid to rest, leaving behind the questionable legacy of
having the word 'sadist' derive from his name. Sade had sexual
depravity in his genes: Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's mistress,
once complained vocally about the orgies that were requisite in
aristocratic circles at the time, and Sade's father and uncle were
both renowned for their debauched energies. Sade, meanwhile, from a
young age would go whoring with his valet, taking it in turn to be
pleasured by one another with prostitutes as spectators.

He spent most of his life in jail, despite two daring prison
breaks, for crimes including incarcerating a young girl, whipping
her with a multi-tailed whip then masturbating into her wounds, and
poisoning four prostitutes with Spanish fly (an unpleasant
side-effect of which he had a 'thing' for). So perverse were his
writings - philosophical discourse, ostensibly, but littered
liberally with wild pornography - that the authorities wanted him
incarcerated for being mad as well as bad, and he died in an asylum
aged 74.

If there is one contemporary toff who still flies the flag for
upper-class hell-raising, it has to be - you've guessed it - Prince
Harry. So far on the charge sheet of the fourth in line to the
British throne, we have: brawling with the paparazzi, accusations
of cheating at his A-level art course, being photographed playing
strip-pool in Las Vegas, and turning up at a fancy dress party with
a swastika around his arm. Also raising hell in posher quarters is
the Oxford University Bullingdon Club - supposedly a dining club,
but really more like football hooliganism in tailcoats with
puffed-up self- entitlement and chequebook destructiveness thrown
in. Their ongoing existence is a further sign that boisterous
revelry among the well-heeled is alive and well and will surely
never end, unless something like the French Revolution were to
happen on a global scale.